By the end of the first month I’d saved enough to buy a bike (I was on 40 a day, so it added up to quite a few quid!). I popped along to the nearest bike shop and got a stealthy looking mountain bike, and started cycling to work.

I soon got bitten by the cycling bug (I’d cycled a lot as a young boy and teenager, but that went by the wayside when I discovered women and beer!) and before long I was changing my knobbly MTB tyres to slicks and surfing the web for cycling and fitness advice. That’s when I stumbled across Cycling Plus (C+).

I enjoyed using the C+ forums and got a lot of useful advice from it, so I thought it might be good to have my own forums. I already owned a web server, so I bought the CycleChat domain and installed some free forum software. Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to develop the idea further and CC sat on my web server not growing very much at all (after two years I think there were about 75 members, and very few posts.)

Then in July 2007 the company that owned the C+ forums (Future Publishing) merged them with other cycling forums they owned to create the BikeRadar brand. Some C+ forumers didn’t like the new site, so I mentioned CycleChat as an alternative and a whole bunch of people signed-up (around 500 of them in just a few short weeks!).

The forum software I was running at the time wasn’t really up to much so I bought vBulletin, tweaked things around to make it easy to use, then recruited about 20 moderators from the new membership to lend a hand (without whose constant and invaluable help I couldn’t manage CycleChat).

CC has been steadily growing ever since and we now have our own cycling kit, international jersey relay, and of course our slinky new blog.